me to my face (as someone but I forgot who)

15 January 2018, 9:05 am

Midwood

Later on, or in another book, there’ll be a video of me walking around the Musée d’Orsay & you can click play to roll the footage & you can watch & you can listen to the everyday sounds of a museum as you read this & in that way, you will have gone further than the text, that is to say you have gone even further than its author, whose function, in the original Latin, is transference

 

I heard that

People don’t write

So much as they move

Image & word around

 

As my inbox will tell you, I somehow subscribed to something called the Quora Digest, a recurring crowd-sourced message thread described by its website as “a place to share knowledge & better understand the world” whose subject titles I browse but which I have yet to open

 

How do I say “I got on the bus” in Spanish?

 

Why is Spanish spoken in Brazil so different & unintelligible?

 

Why is peeing in the shower so controversial?

 

How do Italian restaurants make that good tomato sauce?

 

How cool is Brooklyn?

 

How do you keep somebody talking?

 

If some words are interchangeable, what is the point of keeping them all?

 

What is a fruit that starts with P?

 

When will lunch stop being free at Google?

 

Why do steaks at high-end restaurants taste so different from other steaks?

 

Why are front-row guests asked to uncross their legs at a fashion show?

 

Does coffee taste different if you add sugar first & then cream, or cream first & then sugar?

 

Should I tell my neighbor that law enforcement bugged his apartment?

 

How “dark” exactly is the dark web?

 

Do people not wear shoes in Swedish houses?

 

Were medieval knights athletic?

 

What is the dumbest thing a customer has ever done to escape the room?

 

If I fired a bullet at spinning helicopter blades, what are the odds the bullet makes contact?

 

As any mathematician or chef de cuisine recognizes, the more you begin to itemize materials or ingredients, the more you will begin to see a recipe or model develop, or emerge

 

The Musée d’Orsay was once a train station, constructed for the 1900 World Fair in Paris, just as today’s movies were once real life

 

A book that begins as a B side

 

Me Inside Here

Don’t You Want To

So Deep, So Tortured, So Freak

 

(They call this “reassembled settings”)

 

As anyone who has ever watched the sunset from the window seat

Of a soaring F train east of South Slope

Knows

 

The most important thing is to really break

Up your face

 

One user cautions another user

In a YouTube tutorial

 

(Some of this is suggestive)

 

As any reader of The Da Vinci Code prequel can tell you, antimatter is both optically unavailable & omnipresent. The dark, undetectable entity is said to be “the most powerful energy source known to man”

 

(Black lipstick, black eyeliner, clear tape, scissors, some glitter)

 

In the mirror, I am

Wearing a light red

Shirt-dress & running my hand

Down my abdomen

 

What’s the difference between making & marking marking & marketing marketing & markup language

 

Keywords: system, tagging, structure, instructions, electronic transmission, display

 

(They call this “epidermal thinking”)

 

My phone is

Right now

Suggesting an emoji

As I am

 

Thinking of the difference

Between first-date conversation & conversation

At customs

Considering a certain lack

 

Wanting so bad

To be the swab

On my own bare hands

My neck, the back

 

Of my ankles

The back of my knees

The hard

To reach places

 

What do you do for a living?

 

What is the purpose of your stay?

 

Are you bringing any goods in with you?

 

A reader who pretended to not ever have seen my likeness before once told me to my face they could tell I was very attractive just by the way I wrote or really what it is I didn’t write. They said no one so ugly would ever describe themselves in such an ugly way. What I would have liked to say back to them that is to say back to their face is doesn’t everyone have

 

The right to debase

Themselves in public

 

In the spring of 1918 I lived in an attic in Bordeaux, drafting a novel about a communications device that could also project visuals from around the world, like a film, except in color & with sound, & these images could be contributed by anyone. I spent the evenings turning shadows into strangers with a lantern & a mechanical bird that I’d have to re-wind after every act, because I had gone nowhere & having gone nowhere, I had exactly nothing to show for it. (It was difficult to forget where the draft ends & this begins.) Wind chimes from an open window underneath me & the constant drift of the Garonne which I could only imagine amplified the mood. I, too, was affected. When asked to produce a diaristic account on Moscow for an esteemed travel journal, I devoted the first six pages to my youth in Berlin

 

 

Some things come out

Of order if they

Come at all

 

As someone (but I forgot who) said it is easy to be a communist as a millionaire in Paris

 

The perfect movie would insert documentary footage uncontrollably or arbitrarily, moving from such found footage to the real world of fake characters. The result would not be a movie but a life

 

This is why nobody has to be an actor to die on set

 

 

 

16 January 2018, 11:22 am

Baltimore

 

the scene repeats itself nine times

 

Sophie Calle speaks of a man who, between nine & noon, would watch her strip, sitting in the far left of the room. At noon he would take a razor blade from his pocket & without breaking eye contact, begin to meticulously slice up the illustrations he’d drawn of her, exiting the studio, leaving Sophie Calle with the pieces of herself, strewn over the floor like confetti

 

This scene repeated itself nine times

 

What happened on the tenth? I think now, like I thought then

 

If I could write back to the anonymous admirer I would write back

 

In fact the generational permutations are a result of my running out

 

Of ink in my printer

 

(Only when you enjoy taking selfies will you have the confidence to take more, she explained. & only when you look pretty will you enjoy taking selfies.)

 

If you were looking outside right now you’d enjoy

 

A blue like blue French gas station

 

Jumpsuits     Or the workers who wear them

 

To change the shape of a face requires cutting into the jawbone & I couldn’t

 

Decide whether resting my left arm or my right on the table better conveyed

 

“Maximum desperation"

 

Just re-read the poem

I type out & hit send

When I re-read

I like to read

From the email I write to you

Rather than my own document

That way it already accrues migratory meaning

 

Poems to be

Looked at rather

Than read

 

Poems to be read rather than poems

To be listened to

 

Poems like a feedback loop

(Each time something plays back differently)

 

Change dress shirt to shirt-dress

 

Poems that move off the page

 

(Use doctor

As a verb

More often)

 

She said with a certain satisfaction

Which I will not pretend

To re-create here

 

You must feed them & encourage them & figure out what they like, even before they do

 

(The nurse said that the phone had automatically upgraded me)

Like anyone else

 

I began with no memory

 

Another way of saying this is saying

Meet me halfway

 

The problem with novels or one

Problem is the fact that nothing ever happens

Inside novels    Unlike real life

Where probably there is no room

Even for pauses if one

Were promising to get it

All down in one sitting

 

In an interview I don’t remember having I tell the interviewer that being so much a voyeur myself I wanted to re-create my everyday experience for readers who come to this book even (casually

 

Insert the word jettisoned

During the intermission)

 

There is something in every novel that inevitably fails because it was telegraphed the moment it was written & we can understand its predictability or identify its pattern of behavior in retrospect if not also in the moment that we read it. & yet I want a book with only moments of non-encounters. I want a book that keeps waiting. & in waiting, accumulates desire

 

I guess I am saying a book should be an airport

 

Writing a novel is like writing a poem, without the surprise. I’m thinking now of the reader & the writer

 

T said the most beautiful works deplete or eat

Information at regulated intervals     I think

The best books or the most beautiful ones actually erase

Their authors     To be revealed via

The repetition of reading or in the structure

Of the text     G said something similar

Minus something which I will not reproduce

Here     Think of repetition always

As a way to achieve flow

 

(The scene repeats itself nine times)

 

On the tenth, I am still waiting to be held or had

A friend

 

Says he knows a poem is done

Like he feels a steak on his hand

 

If he were with me

I’d ask what about

 

The cut

 

 

19 September 2018, 2:50 pm

Herald Square

 

 

mine to want

 

 

Sections of this notebook have become too polished. Signals a lack of confidence or certitude in the project. Or my own fancy for performative imperfections. The crack in the form that indicates a faultline between story & discourse

 

(really into fisting cashews at the moment)

 

the interest in resuscitating

certain words

 

the interest in straining

one’s pants

 

The music which corduroys make when one moves, the smell of the cigarette but also the mouth which exhales it / Seeking a proper ventilation which would please all

 

a delight formed in the provision of giving

“selflessly” so as to decline all

responsibility for pleasure received

 

(make a list of words

that are no longer with us)

 

to stand like happiness upon a ball

to play with words with a certain violence

 

so as not to forget your face I saw it full

of data & when I look again

the man is chewing his leather

wallet rather than his steak / this tendency of mine

to want to be wherever &

all the time penetrated

by different forms

of fantasy

 

no telling what marvels

in the unremembered

 

involuntarily imagining my own slow electrical striptease

& your voice-over to viewers

it was kinda a lot

 

wasn’t it    give me

indefinite over infinite give me

everything as incomplete

 

a benedictine bottle’s gradual uncorking

the necktie which owes its elegance

to a certain thickness

in the neck itself     only,

 

the plum still

has to avoid being eaten

 

oscillating density = liberty of indifference     & yet

some asses were made for cinematic blossoming

concept of the “round trip”

 

an obsession with the mechanical

interest of grinding chocolate

as seen from the city street

 

repetition always

breeds “taste”

 

it sometimes takes

years     it took me

 

some days the dissolve

is harder to fake

 

 

[undated]

 

escape to the restroom

 

C relates to me at the department’s welcome back event how he had fallen out of his creaming routine before my abbreviated response, so as to escape to the restroom to record this

 

(C writes interactively / the reader works connections in order to make the text work)

 

the goal or challenge of the notebook:

evoke a personage that you yourself don’t know

yet observes you & is the repository of your confession

+

the decentering of granting myself

a capital letter

 

several papers strewn

across the Fulton Street

stairwell & my urge

for collecting them

 

can I touch it (as a title?)

 

the goal or challenge of the notebook:

to be the author of one’s own death

 

(like Goethe becomes

upon authorial effacement

in translation)

 

can’t help thinking of cloud sharing as a form of visitation of the Holy Ghost: the Pentecostal descent of visual communion

 

can’t help thinking of things to be looked at with a single I

 

 

9 November – 14 November 2018, 10:11 am

Oradell & Midwood & Greenwich Village

 

I am having one of those

 

Nicolas Cage keeps waking up

in different moments of despair

 

certain facts bend

axiomatic

 

everyone is always sighing

in fiction / 3 sighs every 2 pages

 

no longer a question as to why

I no longer write fiction

 

\

 

I hear the prisoner

begins to yearn for interrogation

because the interrogator is the only human being

who talks to you as a human being

 

alternate titles to this entry included

my neighbor, my informer

 

no one was there. everyone had gone shopping

 

(the day the Walls fell, the DDR, in an effort to keep its citizens in the East, gave each one 100 marks & told them to spend the day in the West)

 

I am having another one of those

time interferences, where all the past

leaks out the way once a body

becomes ritual it is

possible to hear all

of its shapes

 

(I am playing that game

again where

I pretend to be your mouth

so I can feel myself inside)

 

the lips

that kiss

themselves

 

\

 

people vaping are like inhaling the Internet via usbs

each gust of cool breath is another hit

to the bandwidth I paid more for

 

not all touches are created equal

 

a curator lamenting someone’s tumble

against a Warhol before the retrospective had even opened

 

another fact:

the hole reserved for the Whitney saved all the merchants in the West Village

the hole, I’ve been told, ate up all the water

 

\

 

A reporter tells me that the number of missing is expected to feed the dead. They say the dead will be fed on the missing. And that’s what is most terrifying. That’s what we are fearing the most. How the missing might be found in the mouth of the dead. How often what’s gone becomes irretrievable. How often or inevitable I am thinking, as the fire continues to eat itself across a coast. It’s been seven days. But I know that it began much earlier than just last week. And I know it will last; it will be with us and for us; it will never leave